By Dan Serres, Conservation Director
I met Shelley Cimon during one of the first meetings I attended as a participant in the Hanford Advisory Board, and I quickly learned that Shelley’s voice was one I could trust to cut through the difficult jargon, complicated history, and technical detail of Hanford cleanup discussions. During a particularly muddled discussion about a flawed plan to leave plutonium buried uncontained in Hanford’s soils, Shelley offered a plainspoken challenge to the Board and to the U.S. Department of Energy. I recall Shelley saying something like, “Plutonium is forever. The River itself may have moved before plutonium goes through one half-life – 24,000 years. We have a moral responsibility to clean up this site.” I was impressed by how Shelley’s words jump-started a discussion and empowered others to speak about the pitfalls of leaving long-lived, dangerous waste behind. In the end, we called on Energy to dig deeper, a call that we continue to make as the Hanford cleanup struggles forward.
The issues we were discussing in 2009 – worker safety, leaking tanks, pollution reaching the Columbia River, and contamination deep in Hanford’s soils and groundwater – remain challenging today, and I continue to look to Shelley as a person who will wrestle with the long-term implications of Hanford’s nuclear legacy. Since 2014, Columbia Riverkeeper has been able to rely on Shelley’s perspective in a more formal way, where Shelley, Steve White and I work together to represent the organization on the Hanford Advisory Board (HAB). The HAB is federally authorized citizen advisory board tasked with providing public policy advice to the Department of Energy (Energy), Department of Ecology (Ecology), and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about cleanup challenges at Hanford. Working on a consensus model, the HAB brings together tribes, citizen groups, local governments, workers, and scientists to assist in the difficult work of finding ways to protect the Columbia River from nuclear and chemical pollution as the Columbia flows through North America’s most contaminated site.
Shelley brings an immense depth of experience and knowledge to her volunteer work on behalf of Columbia Riverkeeper. A resident of La Grande, where she lives with her husband, Norm, she has worked on nuclear waste issues in Oregon and Washington for decades. In the 1980s, Shelley was a member of the Oregon State Governor's Local Emergency Planning Committee, helping to develop a model response plan from which cities and other governments develop plans for response to radiological accidents. Shortly after, Shelley was invited to be a founding member of the Oregon Hanford Cleanup Board, on which she served from 1987-2004. In addition to participating in the convening discussions for the Hanford Advisory Board, she was also a member of the Tank Waste Task Force, helping representatives from Energy, Ecology, and EPA negotiate legally binding milestones for cleanup of 149 Single Shell Tanks at Hanford. And Shelley has held multiple leadership positions on the Hanford Advisory Board, where she now volunteers as a representative for Columbia Riverkeeper. In La Grande, when not combing through Hanford cleanup documents, Shelley is a self-employed contractor, drafts person, artist, weaver, and practitioner of what she calls the “zen” of Dressage with her horse, Mocha Joe.
Through her role as a representative on the Hanford Advisory Board, Shelley has advocated for an aggressive, thorough cleanup – one that is protective of the Columbia River, its spawning habitat, and the downstream communities that rely on it. Shelley’s connection to the Columbia River and the Hanford site inspires her to bring a new generation into the effort to clean up Hanford. As Shelley told us recently, “I’ve been at this for decades, and I’m really concerned about what will be forgotten if we don’t get more young people involved - before it’s too late and the knowledge is lost. Time is of the essence for getting fifty-six million gallons of tank waste vitrified.” Personally, I am grateful for Shelley’s knowledge and her eagerness to share it with the next generation of Hanford watchdogs.
In coming months, with the help of Riverkeeper’s members, we will continue to push for greater regional awareness about Hanford’s radioactive, toxic legacy. We will demand effective action from the federal government before, as Shelley puts it, “it’s too late.”
